Mastering C# and Unity3D

Posts Tagged performance

Last week in the series we took a step back to verify that the C++ plugin’s performance was acceptable. With that confirmed, we’ll continue this week by making our programming lives easier. One pain point so far has been with exposing new Unity APIs to C++. It’s not that it’s difficult to do this, but there’s a lot of boilerplate required. That boilerplate takes time to write and it’s easy to make mistakes copying and pasting existing functions. So this week’s article introduces a code generator that will write the boilerplate for us! We’ll also reorganize the project a little so the code that supports C++ scripting is separated away from our game code. That’ll make it easy to add support for C++ scripting to any Unity project.

In the firstthreeparts of this series, we focused on setting up a development environment that makes it easy and safe to write our game code in C++. Today’s article takes a step back to assess where we are in terms of performance. Is what we’ve built so far viable, or are the calls between C# and C++ too expensive? To find out we’ll use the existing framework to write some simple performance tests.

The Unity API can mostly only be used from the main thread. This is used as an excuse by Unity developers to write all their code on the main thread. This makes their code run 2-6x slower. So what can we do about it? Today’s article presents a simple way to use the Unity API from other threads. Read on to learn how to unlock all that extra CPU power!

Threads allow us do more than one thing at a time using the CPU’s cores, but it turns out we can do more than one thing at a time using just a single core! Today’s article shows you how you can do this and the huge speed boost it can give you!

We’ve seen how using the CPU’s cache can lead to a 13x speedup, but that’s only utilizing one of the CPU’s cache types. Today’s article shows you how to go further by utilizing a whole other type of CPU caching!

Last week’s article showed how to effectively use the CPU’s caches to boost performance by an order of magnitude. Today’s article goes even further to show you how to use even more of the CPU’s capabilities!

Most programmers write code for an abstract computer. The thing is- code runs on a real computer that works in a specific way. Even if your game is going to run on a wide range of devices, knowing some of the common features can speed up your code 10x or more. Today’s article shows you how!

Sometimes it seems like Unity programming is a minefield. Plenty of innocuous-looking code secretly creates garbage and eventually the GC runs and causes a frame hitch. Today’s article is about some of those less-obvious ways to create garbage.

It’s extremely common to see somebody ask a question about avoiding the garbage collector only to be answered with “just use a pool” as if that immediately and totally solved the problem. While pools will often keep the garbage collector at bay, they’ll also introduce a whole slew of new problems that you’ve got to deal with instead. Today’s article goes through several of these problems so you’ll be aware of the tradeoffs involved and hopefully avoid some pitfalls.

Over a year ago I wrote an article title Do Foreach Loops Create Garbage using Unity 5.2 and tested foreach with a variety of collections: List, Dictionary, arrays, etc. Since then Unity has a new C# compiler and version 5.6 has been released. Is it safe to use foreach now? Read on to find out!